Bay County drafts master recreation plan with 14 municipalities

BAY CITY, MI -- Bay County is looking for public input for their five-year recreation plan that looks to gather grant money for projects within communities in the county to develop.

The five-year plan — 2019 through 2023 — will also mark the first time Bay City has joined the county plan with the other municipalities. Historically, Bay City has created its own recreation master plan.

Terry Moultane, planning and zoning manager for Bay City, said by joining the county master plan the city will help save staff time and money instead of doing it on its own.

With Bay County and the 14 other municipalities coming together, Cristen Gignac, director of recreation and facilities for Bay County, said it’s something unique to do for most counties.

“So the DNR requires to have a five-year rec plan,” she said. “It’s a little different (for Bay County) than other communities because we do it with intergovernmental cooperation between 14 other cities and Bay County.”

According to the master plan, which is an update from the 2014 master plan, the participating cities include Auburn, Bay City, Essexville, Pinconning and the participating townships are Bangor, Beaver, Frankenlust, Hampton, Kawkawlin, Fraser, Merrit, Monitor, Portsmouth, Williams and Bay County.

Gignac added that every municipality takes it back to their communities, and adopts the plan with ways on how they can use it for their community.

“One of the big parts of this grant is we do public input,” she said, adding during the month of September they had a survey that went out to the community. “There was a lot of interest in disc golf, you’ll see that as a priority in a handful of different places.”

She also added that some of the common interests among all of the communities included dog parks, walking and biking trails. Gignac said that roughly 57 percent of people who took the survey said they were interested in the bike and walking trails with around 30 percent interested in more dog parks or playscapes.

For Bay City, two of the big projects, Moultain said, were continued improvements at Wenonah Park downtown and the Imagination Station project, for which the city received a $300,000 grant.

“We use the public input to drive some of our local action planning,” Gignac said. “Right now, we are in the public comment period, we have a public hearing scheduled at the board of commissioner meeting for all 15 municipalities on Jan. 8, 2019,” she said.

After that public comment period, the plan is expected to be completed in February.